Virtual Hosts

Upon request any staff member can easly get a virtual host. You will become the formal supervisor of the host. Of course you can give additional superuser access to the installed system to your students.

The virtualization is based on x86_64 KVM. Typical VMs get ~512MB RAM, 30GB HDD, 1 vCPU, a virtual network interface bridged to the VLAN ibr-misc, and a password protected VNC console. Other configurations are possible upon request.

Most VMs are setup with a small Ubuntu LTS system with a configuration that uses the IBR LDAP and NFS infrastructure, so that all IBR users can easily login. You can also get a plain Ubuntu system or even just the VM that boots via PXE and you choose an installation from the IBR PXE menu using the VCN console.

If you want to request a VM, please send an email to Frank Steinberg. We need the following information:

hostname (preferably a project-related name, not too long)

need for a public IPv4 address and DNS domain? (otherwise a NATed private address)

So, we can connect our VNC client to vnc://kvm1.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de:5937 using the shown PASSWORD.

Update: You no longer need to remember the hypervisor, just the port. All VNC consoles can now be accessed through a NAT proxy, e.g. vnc://proxy.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de:5937 using the same PASSWORD.

Update2: All KVM VNC consoles are now reachable through a new NAT proxy on the well known VNC port 5900, e.g. vnc://myhost.mgmt.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de:5900 using the same PASSWORD.

You can start, shutdown, reset, reboot your VMs through the ibr-vm-control command.

Things you don't have to care about: Disk storage is based on iSCSI targets. These iSCSI devices are part of our regular backup. The infrastructure supports live migration, which is used in cases of hypervisor maintenance or to rebalance loads.